I want to get out of that book for a second
and go into something else.
While coming across on the Sun City Express
yesterday from Phoenix--
it's one of those situations where there are only four people
on the bus, and you're just all comfortable and cozy,
and a certain point, I'm looking out at this incredible landscape
that you-- you know, you see all the time,
so it doesn't look like much to you--
but week before last, I was in Egypt.
And the week after that, I was in Israel,
and so being here in the Arizona desert
was like a continuation of where I'd been.
I mean, very similar in the landscapes.
And so I was struck by it, and I wrote a crazy, kind
of spontaneous poem, which I doctored up
a little bit this morning.
But this was written yesterday, coming in,
and they very kindly printed it up for me
over at the Poetry Center.
So this is raw, and it's called--
probably get other poets coming through doing this,
and in fact, Alison was talking about trying
to do an anthology of these kinds of ephemeral,
visiting poets' poems--
this is called "Desert Footage: Three Dissolves."
"One-- crossing, we arrive.
We change up.
We come back inside the original oasis, that quivering water,
its cool-holed message, no mirage, a power mirror, ours.
Two-- brushes with sages, lifetime leads,
unload, unjam right here, where now don't need no start,
don't need no count, where lust like dusty first impressions
suns up, suns down, and falls away
by twists and blazing turns.
Stopped coal by night, excitement slows.
Zigzag-- the jazz of cactus fuzz and insect buzz, and lizards
whizzing every which way nowhere, and buzzards minding
their own lazy business zooms, the horizon a shining rim shot.
Three-- bowled over by blue, by light, and cooling cloud,
desert can reach its peaks and depths, its flats
and sharps with singular, insular pleasure.
And treasures we always haul back
lack the track record market value
wealth wish we've been air-conditioned to cherish.
In malls and designer back alleys of urgent dreaming,
desire grinds, and bumps, and tallies, and bills,
but back here at home, back smack in the desert,
silence and space ease in and replace, get and gimme,
and mucho and gotcha, or do we get erased,
who thrill of peace in thrones out here,
where water walks and kings don't mean a thing."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.